So... here are my two favorite people in the whole world, on top of the Great Wall of China at Mutianyu, about an hour and a half north of Beijing. You can see said wall snaking away behind Suzanne and Lillia, which it will continue to do for the next Several Thousand Miles, being not the Insufficient Wall of China. Of course it has been said that the Great Wall never really stopped an invading army (cf. Khan, Genghis and horde, Manchu), but fans of security theater at American airports know how important the illusion of safety is to a well-functioning society. We had an exciting trip by both public bus and private conveyance. An entrepreneur with a mini bus took us over the last leg. He was a ruddy-faced, burly fellow with an anger management problem, evidenced by the amount of yelling he did over his cell phone as he drove us up the mountain, but we did get there in one piece, and home again.
And here's me with the Best Little Girl ever.
We took the chair-lift up the mountainside from the town, which felt more rickety than it was. It leads to a stainless steel toboggan run down from the base of the wall (designed and constructed by German engineers, the brochure reassures us) to the town below.
Lillia was totally into this. And so we bought tickets and stood in line, and stood in line. And stood in line. And then we were off in a double toboggan, Lillia in front, Tommy-boy as brakeman and human seatbelt for my five year old. It was actually quite pleasant sliding down the stainless steel track through the green turning to reds and yellows of the fall foliage, curving left and right again and again. Then, draped across the the track, a red flag with large letters, in English, warning "SLOW DOWN!", conveniently placed at a height to clothesline the unwary. I ducked, of course, but the bottom of the flag grabbed my glasses and tossed them somewhere down the slope. They were gone, and life was fuzzy.
When questioned about retrieving my $450 specs, the lift operator at the bottom said something in Chinese that might be approximated as "Dude, you've got to be kidding." So we left to return to Beijing.
Back at the Mao Er, Angela, our lovely hotelier, brought me to the local optometrist the next day and helped me through the exam. And about 3 hours later I had a pair of inexpensive, but quite serviceable, Chinese glasses.
No, these aren't those. The optometrist had me wear these for about 10 minutes to make sure the prescription was comfortable.
American tourist on a Chinese bus, wearing
Chinese glasses and holding Very Tired Daughter.
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